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GOVERNMENT
New Zealand is a parliamentary democracy. Like Great Britain, it has no written constitution. The legislature, which has been unicameral since 1950, comprises 95 members who serve 3-year terms. Ninety-one are elected by universal suffrage and 4 are elected from Maori electoral rolls. The British monarch, represented by a governor-general, is recognized as queen of New Zealand. Executive authority rests with a cabinet headed by a prime minister. New Zealand was the first country to enfranchise women (in 1893), and all citizens aged 18 and over are eligible to vote. Counties, boroughs, district councils, and town districts are units of local government.
New Zealand’s leaders have been committed to moderately controlled economic system and an extensive social welfare system since the 1930s. The two major political parties are the Labour party (founded 1916), which originated most of the nation’s social welfare and labor legislation, and the National party (founded 1931), which traditionally favors personal initiative, private enterprise, and the dismantling of extensive government controls. The Labour party controlled the government during the periods 1935-49, 1958-61, 1972-75, and again from 1984, when National party leader Robert David Muldoon was replaced as prime minister by David Lange.
NEW ZEALAND CITIES
Auckland, the most northern of New Zealand’s four main cities, has the biggest population; almost one million people live there. It is the biggest city too; to get from one end of Auckland to the other one you need to travel fifty kilometers. Auckland has two harbours, the Manukau in the west and the Waitemata in the east; at the narrowest part it is only 1.5 kilometers from one to the other.
Auckland is a modern business center with many high-rise buildings. One-third of Auckland’s population come from islands in the Pacific, so Auckland has the biggest group of these people of any city in the world.
Sprawling between the two large harbours, Auckland has a lot of enthusiastic yachters who sail back, forth and around on weekends and make it look very picturesque – the city is nicknamed ‘the City of Sails’.
One of the most interesting places in Auckland is Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World and Antarctic Encounter. It is a unique aquarium housed in old storm water holding tanks. An acrylic tunnel runs through the aquarium and you travel through on a moving footpath, with the fish swimming all around you. You can step off at any time to take a better look and the whole place is designed to recreate the experience of scuba diving around the coast of New Zealand.
Windy Wellington at the southern end of the North Island is the capital of New Zealand and has a population of 325,000. Wellington is built on high hills around a lovely harbour, and has a lots of good shops, restaurants and theaters.
Three buildings from New Zealand’s parliamentary complex. By far the most distinctive and well known is the modernist building known as the Beehive – because that just what it looks like. Designed by British architect Sir Basil Spence, it was begun in 1969 and completed in 1980. this building houses the executive offices.
Next door, the Old Parliament Building, completed in 1922. Beside this, the neo-Gothic Parliamentary Library building is the oldest in the parliamentary complex.
Opposite the Beehive stands Old Government Building, one of the largest all-wooden buildings in the world – there’s a wooden temple in Japan which beats it for ‘the biggest’ honours.
Christchurch is the South Island’s city with 300,000 people. It is a flat, green place; one-third of the city is parks and gardens, gardens of geranium, chrysanthemums and carefully edged lawns where not a blade of grass is out of place. To many people Christchurch is ‘the most English city outside England’; it was designed in England, and its river is called the Avon. The name Christchurch comes from Christ Church College at Oxford, as one of the leaders of the early settlers was educated there. Even the central square is dominated by a neogothic cathedral in the fashion of English towns.
New Zealand’s fourth city has the old name for Edinburgh – Dunedin. In the nineteenth century it was the center of New Zealand’s business and its largest city. Many of Dunedin’s most beautiful buildings were built at this time. It also has New Zealand’s oldest university.
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